On an impulse, while my system came up, I phoned Morrell’s editor in New York. Don Strzepek and Morrell had known each other for years, since their Peace Corps days in Jordan, and I hoped Don might know what Morrell was up to. When I only reached his voice mail, I didn’t bother to leave a message.
I wanted a human voice. I wanted Morrell. E-mail is too remote. A traditional letter has more intimacy-you can hold the paper that someone else touched, but with e-mail, you type and send but never touch or hear. Morrell himself was beginning to seem so distant it was hard for me to feel that he was real. I studied the photo I had on my desk, his wiry curly hair, his thin face, the mouth that had kissed me, but I couldn’t summon his voice or the touch of his long fingers.
Ulysses chose his path, Penelope: don’t let that control you, I adjured myself sternly. “Don’t weep over yourself,” my mother had told me-I was eight or nine, and wrapped in misery because the girls I usually played with had gone to a birthday party I wasn’t invited to-“Do something.” That afternoon she’d abandoned dinner preparations and let me play dress-up in her concert gown, weaving an improbable story for me as Signora Vittoria della Cielo e Terra. Today I began searching the Web for stories about Calvin Bayard. Maybe I could find out why no one was allowed to talk to him. Or had Renee been spinning me a line?
When my Web search brought me the Bayard phone number, I called out to the New Solway estate, and my heart beat a little faster: What if I did get through to him? What would I say to my hero?
When a woman answered, I said I was one of Calvin’s old interns. “I’m in town this week; it would mean a lot to get to see him.”
“He isn’t scheduling that kind of appointment now,” the woman said in a deep rough voice.
“I’d settle for a chance to say hello on the phone,” I wheedled.
He couldn’t come to the phone. There wasn’t a good time to call back. I should try Mrs. Bayard at the company number if I had business with the Bayards. Her good-bye was truncated by the clicking of the handset.
So what was going on? If he was sick, why didn’t they just say so? Something about New Solway made me imagine Gothic scenarios: Calvin was dead, and to keep control of the company, Renee had organized a massive conspiracy to make the world think her husband was still alive. Calvin’s embalmed body lay in a giant freezer in the estate’s old icehouse. Marc had found it there, and Renee had murdered him.
Making things up was more fun than research, but research gets the job done. I started reading news stories on Nexis, hoping to find out when Calvin had last been seen in public. Five years ago, he’d stepped down from formal leadership of Bayard Publishing and Renee had assumed the CEO spot. The Herald-Star and the New York Times both did big stories on it. Industry scuttlebutt said she’d been in charge for a good four years already.
That was all the Web could tell me. Calvin hadn’t been at charity balls or any other public event, at least not any reported in the press, since his retirement. To find out anything more, I needed to do old-fashioned legwork, talk to friends and neighbors. For which Darraugh would definitely not pay me. Although come to think of it, he probably knew-that would be an easy question to slip in when we next spoke.
When I switched my search to Olin Taverner, I picked up a slew of hits. I chose the National Public Radio report, which had the advantage of being something I could absorb with my eyes shut. I logged onto a real-time player and leaned back to listen to the report.
Taverner had died in Anodyne Park-but he had grown up in New Solway. So not only were he and Calvin Bayard old enemies, they must have been old playmates; they were roughly the same age, after all. They used to gallop around New Solway on their ponies together or knout the servants, or whatever it is that very rich children do to amuse themselves.
Perhaps Marcus Whitby had been on his way to see Taverner when death stopped for him. I was getting up to find my detail map of the area, to see if there was a way for a man going on foot to Anodyne Park to end up in Larchmont’s pool, when the Bayard name arrested my attention again.